Crown of Crystal Flame
Page 16

The ground beneath her feet was covered in a thick layer of what she first thought were broken shards of sun-bleached shells. She stumbled on a rounded bulge hidden beneath the shards, and pain darted up her leg as her ankle twisted beneath her weight.
Ellysetta nearly fell to her knees, but she managed to catch her balance. She turned to see what had tripped her, and her stomach clenched with a sudden surge of nausea.
The rounded bulge was a skull… a man’s skull.
White teeth grinned in a macabre smile beneath the gray-white shadows of empty eye sockets.
She took a stumbling step backward, away from the skull, and the shells beneath her feet crunched and snapped. Only then did she realize these were not stones, nor shells. They were bones. Shattered as if by some god’s terrible hammer. Bleached white and brittle by the sun.
The remnants of what had once been living, breathing people.
Thousands of people.
And in the center of that barren landscape, upon that graven sea of the dead, Ellysetta stood alone. Garbed in scarlet from head to toe like a splash of blood on the snow-white field.
And she knew, with a certainty she could not explain, that every person whose shattered skeleton lay beneath her feet had died because of her.
Ellysetta’s eyes opened. The brittle white boneyard of her dream became the night-dark ceiling of the room she and Rain shared at Kreppes. She could hear the low voices of her quintet just outside the bedroom door.
She sat up, and out of habit turned to check the Sentinel blooms beneath her pillow. The flowering sprigs were still in place, as they had been every night since leaving Elvia. Not a Mage-sent dream then.
Beside her, Rain stirred. His hand flexed against the bed-sheets, seeking her. Shei’tani. The sleepy call drifted from his mind. Not Spirit, merely an unchecked thought.
She brushed back the silky spill of hair that feathered across his brow. “Las, kem’san. Ruliath.” Peace, my love. Go back to sleep. A push of encouraging Spirit accompanied the words, a gentle weave that she laid upon him without guilt.
He was so weary. The fact that her dream had woken her but not him was proof of his utter exhaustion. He had been so strong for so long, but his vast power was beginning to flag. Madness—both from the trauma of war and from their uncompleted truemate bond—was chipping away at the powerful barriers that held back the torment of his overburdened soul. Yesterday, his thoughts had been so loud her quintet had heard them on several occasions.
Since the moment she’d called him from the sky, he had taken care of her, looked after her, put her safety before his own. Now it was her turn to give him back a fraction of that devotion. She loved him so. No longer because he was the hero of her dreams but because he was the Fey, flawed and yet so fine, who had won her heart. He was a king, a great and noble leader of the immortal Fey, but he was also just Rain, her beloved, hers to protect.
And she would protect him… just as fiercely as the tairen defended the pride.
When she was certain he was well and deeply asleep, she rose from the bed and dressed quietly, drawing a thick, furlined velvet cloak over her gown. There would be no more sleep for her tonight. The strange, disturbing dream hadn’t terrified her, as her dreams often did, but it had left her tense and unsettled all the same. She needed to get out of this room and go for a walk to clear her thoughts.
In the antechamber outside the bedroom, she was surprised to see the five warriors of primary quintet instead of her secondary.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, closing the door behind her. “Shouldn’t you all be asleep?”
“Shouldn’t you?” Gaelen countered.
She arched a brow, then had to smile. “Mei sorro.” The phrase, which meant well struck, was one Fey warriors used in training when their sparring partners hit a good blow. It was a phrase she’d become quite familiar with since Gaelen and her quintet had begun training her in the use of Fey weapons. She was getting better at hitting precisely where she aimed but still had work to do to improve her own defenses.
“More dreams?” Bel asked softly. He watched her closely, his gaze filled with a mix of certainty and concern.
“Aiyah.” She grimaced, then confessed, “I’m beginning to question the real reason Lord Galad gave me those Sentinel blooms. They seem to make me dream more, not less.”
“You’re starting to learn the true nature of Elf gifts,” her uncle Tajik muttered sourly. “When an Elf gives you a rose, always look for the thorn.”
She turned to the red-haired Fire master with a puzzled frown. “Why do you hate the Elves so?” Her uncle never had a kind word to say about his woodland kinsmen.
“I don’t hate all Elves,” he clarified. “Just their king.”
“What has Lord Galad done to earn your wrath?”
“You mean besides sentencing my sister and her mate to a thousand years of torment? “
“You were bitter before you learned that.” She pinned him with a level gaze.
Tajik looked away. “I loved once. An elf maid named Aliya. With her brother’s consent, we would have bound ourselves to one another in e’tanitsa.” He shrugged. “Instead, he sent her to her doom.”
Ellysetta’s hand flew to her throat. “Aliya was Lord Hawks-heart’s sister? Tajik, are you saying Galad Hawksheart sent his own sister to her death? “
Tajik nodded. “I could have saved her, but he made sure I didn’t. Had she lived, it would have changed a Verse in a minor Song, but he said that one change might have rippled to a greater, more important Song, and put its outcome in danger. He wasn’t willing to take that risk. Her death ensured that change wouldn’t happen.”